We hear that Facebook has over 100 million users, and that LinkedIn has 45 Million members, and Ryze has ? - well I don't think anyone has a number.

Let us imagine a number, I'll choose a small one. Let's say Ryze has one million members. What difference does that make to you?

Very little, because YOU can only contact two sorts of people, those connected as friends, and those who share a network. BOTH these means of expanding your Ryze Network as sorely neglected. Both these means of expanding your network are FREE, they don't depend on having a paid membership.

I did some rough numbers on a Ryze network last night. Here is the result. I opened 20 Ryze pages. Yes it's a tiny sample. but the results are not too far from what I expected.

The median member (The middle one, which is not quite the same as average.) was in FOUR networks and had ZERO friends.

If we assume that networks contain 1000 members, (That number is too high.) then the medial member can communicate with 4000 people. That's how BIG Ryze is for him.

If we look at the least connected person. He is in ONE network with zero friends. Ryze size for him is 1000. (I expect he doesn't know that yet, he's only got 2 homepage hits.)

If we look at the most connected person in the sample, he is in ELEVEN networks with 28 Friends. So for him the size of Ryze is 11,000 plus 28, plus the friends of friends. If we look to the median, friends of friends is zero, so that makes no difference. 11,028 is the approximate size of Ryze.

There is NO BARRIER stopping any reader of this post from joining eleven networks (Or even 30 or more). It's FREE, you just need to WANT to do it.

There is NO BARRIER stopping any reader of this post from having 28 friends (Or a lot more.) Moreover, it should not be difficult to add one friend a week, adding only people you've come to meet and exchange messages with on Ryze.

SO: six months after joining Ryze it's a reasonable expectation that every member might be a member of eleven networks and have 28 friends. (There's a little challenge for you.)

If that was the Median, instead of being the Top, what difference would that make to the apparent size of Ryze.

You are a member of 11 networks but networks are now much bigger say 3000 members each. And you have 28 friends each of whom has 28 friends. (We'll ignore duplicates for simplicity) So how big is the Ryze, you can now communicate with?

11 x 3000 = 33,000
28 x 28 = 784
So now Ryze is roughly 34,000 people for you.

What I'm saying here, is that every Ryze member has a interest in the success of every other Ryze member. When other people are successful that multiplies your own effort. The top person I spoke about above had a network of 11,000, but if everyone had a similar network, the effective size of that same network is 34,000.

There are other network effects too that increase the POWER of the network as it grows. Briefly, when the network doubles in size the number of connections quadruples.

And there are also Grouping Effects. Because you can join networks, "birds of feather" can easily "flock together" and that increases the power and the value of connections.

So: Get off your tail, join lots of networks, and use the permissions box to share your email address with people you "know". Some of those people will reply with a Friends Request. You are on your way.

Private Reply to John Stephen Veitch